WDC Blog - From the Front Line

It has been a great pleasure in the last few weeks to see two of the modest super-heroes of the marine mammal world honoured for their work.

Firstly, we have the English veterinarian, James Barnett who for many years has worked closely with the UK’s rescue organization, British Divers Marine Life Rescue. James is the man who everyone turns to when they need advice about how to cope with many tricky marine situations. Whether it is a whale stranding or a off-colour seal pup, James is the man to ask. He has also been an enthusiastic teacher for the UK’s network of marine mammal medics and what make’s James’ contribution all the more remarkable is that he does what he does as a volunteer, like many of the people he is advising.

James’ award was given to him by the Marine Animal Rescue Coalition (MARC) at its annual meeting in November. This is a UK forum for all those involved in trying to help marine animals. (A brief history of MARC can be found here.)

The award to James Barnett was the first award in MARC’s 16 year history – an exceptional award to an exceptional man.

Paul Jepson the UK’s stranding co-ordinator and Mark Simmonds, Chair of MARC, made the presentation (a sperm whale tooth mounted on a wooden plaque bearing an inscription recognizing this first MARC life-time award). Paul noted James’ dedication the wildlife rescue through the various phases of his career, including his Churchill Fellowship to the US where he went to study rescue methods; knowledge that was well used on his return. Mark noted how James’ contributions underpinned so much of the rescue work in the UK.


James Barnett (in the blue shirt) is congratulated by Mark Simmonds and other members of MARC. Alan Knight, the Director of BDMLR who was unable to attend the meeting sent the following message:

"James has championed the cause of marine mammal medicine for the past 18 years. He has always given his time to work with marine mammals and has produced 6 editions of the Marine Mammal Handbook which is now recognized as a leader in the field of marine mammal rescue. James has managed to tread the very difficult line between Scientists, Vets, rehabilitators and rescuers, producing protocols that all groups find acceptable. I feel James is a worthy recipient of the first award given by MARC.”

The other modest recipient of an exceptional and entirely justified award is our old friend the Italian cetacean expert, environmentalist and philosopher, Dr Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara. He has recently been given a knighthood in the Order of Saint-Charles by H.S.H. the Prince Albert II of Monaco. Giuseppe is a renowned champion of cetacean-kind and the founder and president of Tethys, the Mediterranean group that WDCS works closely with. For more details of Giuseppe’s work and his award please click here.

Today WDCS turns to the matter of toothfish in Antarctica. At up to 2.5 m long they can be the size of a porpoise or dolphin. Left alone, they live for up to 50 years; they don’t breed until they’re about 16 and not every year thereafter. But aside from some remarkably similar reproductive parameters why is the toothfish relevant to whales and dolphins?

The reason is that Antarctic toothfish is being caught at what may be an unsustainable pace in a place where they shouldn’t be caught at all: Antarctica’s Ross Sea, one of the most treasured, least affected ecosystems on Earth. It is an area full of Antarctic minke whales, southern bottlenose and Arnoux’s beaked whales and three ecotypes of killer whales, or orcas, which may someday be considered three species. (The fish-eating orca ecotype sometimes dines on toothfish.) The 250,000-square-mile (647,000 sq km) Ross Sea has been proposed as a highly protected marine reserve. Preserving it for its biological wonders and as a laboratory for studying climate change is a “no brainer” as the Americans like to say — something that anyone in their right minds would say: “that’s a great idea; let’s do it!”

Enter the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the UK-based Moody Marine which this week proposed to certify Ross Sea toothfish for the kitchens, tables and restaurants of higher-end society. At $28/lb in US markets where it masquerades as “Chilean sea bass” or simply “sea bass”, it is not likely to turn up as fish ‘n’ chips. Giving this “green label” to the exploitation of Ross Sea toothfish is “completely inappropriate,” says Sidney Holt, a long-time expert on fish population dynamics as well as on the Antarctic and whales.

It is not just the whale and overfishing lobbies who are upset about this. A large number of scientists and conservation organizations have joined together as part of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) to protest this misguided seal of approval being given to “an exploratory fishery with no reliable stock assessment” in the words of Ross Sea scientist David Ainley.

You can read more about it here. ASOC hopes that MSC will listen to reason and refuse to certify Ross Sea toothfish.

Meanwhile the Ross Sea remains unprotected despite discussions in a number of key Antarctic meetings this year. The Antarctic body called CCAMLR is charged with creating a network of MPAs in the Antarctic with a target of 2012 for completion but has not yet given its full attention to the Ross Sea. As one of the most precious places on Earth many people will continue to defend it against further exploitation.

In recent days the Japanese have launched yet another “scientific whaling” foray to Antarctica. The intention is to catch their self-allotted minke whale total in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary and they may well, as in years past, take some of them from the heart of the Ross Sea, too.

But today the issue is toothfish and the fact that this fishery also catches the complete range of benthic species which make up vulnerable marine ecosystems including stony corals, black corals, gorgonians, sponges and bryozoans. These organisms, thousands of years old, ironically provide habitat for toothfish, but all is laid to waste. It is a bit like cutting down the forest to supply deer for the king’s table.

It is clearly time that the Ross Sea gets the full protection it deserves.

I am reading John Keegan's tome on 'The First World War'. Not only is a great piece of history (maybe all political scholars of European history should seek to understand how this conflict and the fifty years preceding that helped shape Europe - but that's an aside).

What struck me was the fact that the similarities of the democratic deficit that led to this awful conflict is in some ways similar to the democratic deficit in Japan with respect to public access to the whaling debate.

The new Japanese Government has instigated a review of publicly funded science in Japan, but I'd not see the Japanese commercial whaling (sorry, I mean 'scientific whaling') falling under this purview.

Maybe because very little science actually takes place, or that the very little that can be claimed is simply about increasing whaling activity, - or maybe because its not an area that the Government of Japan want the public to get involved in assessing.

Keegan notes that in 1913 Europe, the plans of Schlieffen, Moltke and colleagues, for war were not subject to scrutiny by elected or even regal authorities. Without checks and balances the very fact that these officers and civil servants continued to develop war plans that predecessors had started years before meant that war became an inevitability.

In the Japanese whaling debate we are unable to see where the elected officialdom of Japan ends and the power of unelected civil servants begins - who takes responsibility? As recently discussed here and in the media the civil servants in Japan who have continued the long planned assault on whales are increasingly being challenged on the issue of their webs of involvement with commercial companies that benefit from whaling.

When Japan decides to continue whaling who is actually making that decision and who benefits? Is it the people of Japan and their elected officials, or an unelected grouping that straddle the world of commerce and 'government'.

The result of a democratic deficit in Europe was four years of hell for millions of people. The results on the high seas has been a savagery and suffering for thousands of animals. And before anyone attacks me, of course its not the same thing, but suffering when it should not have happened is still suffering and a bloody legacy that should have been avoided.

All marine conservation eyes are turning to Australia where Environment Minister Peter Garrett has some very important papers in his in-box. He is being asked by a large number of Australian conservation groups, the Save Our Marine Life (SOML) consortium, supported by international cetacean scientists, to set aside substantial portions of southwest, northwest and northern Australia in highly protected marine areas.

This is part of the same region that has just experienced the devastating Timor oil spill, so Minister Garrett’s decision will be very timely.

Nearly three decades ago Australia launched the modern movement to protect marine areas with its designation of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Over the past few years, however, marine protection efforts in Australia have slowed down while designations in the Pacific and portions of the Antarctic have accelerated. The Great Barrier Reef is no longer the largest MPA in the world, nor is it the most highly protected; several areas in other countries have now surpassed it.

Many Australians are eager that their government revives its leadership in marine conservation affairs. With its dominant location in the great southern ocean, Australia has the capacity to make huge strides now for marine conservation in the lead-up to 2012 when countries are going to be evaluated on what they have done in terms of creating effective marine protected areas and restoring marine biodiversity.

The decision is going to be made on Southwest Australian MPAs and reserves before Christmas 2009, with the northwest and northern areas to follow in early 2010. WDCS is asking people to send an urgent email to Minister Garrett to recommend he vote for the highest possible protection levels for whales, dolphins and marine life. Click here.

I could have hoped that humanity would have learned the lesson that we know very little about the marine environment.

Over the last twelve months we have realized that a species of river dolphins is in fact two (see our section on river dolphins). When politicians tell us that there is 'X amount of cetaceans', often latter evidence is that we actually had 'B', 'C' and 'D' populations making up 'X-Y' of a total for the species. The whaling debate is littered with these issues.

The BBC now reports that a species of skate could become the first marine fish driven to extinction by commercial fishing. The BBC goes onto say 'A
study reveals that an error in the classification of the species has
meant researchers have failed to see just how close to the brink it is'.

'The research team, led by Samuel Iglesias from the Marine Biology
Station in Concarneau on the west coast of France, paints a very bleak
picture for the future of the flapper skate..

Dr Iglesias said: "The threat of extinction for European Dipturus together with mislabelling in fishery statistics highlight the need for a huge reassessment of population for the different Dipturus species in European waters.

"Without revision and recognition of its distinct status the world's largest skate, D. intermedia, could soon be rendered extinct."'

Years ago I visited the Japanese Far Seas Fisheries team in Tokyo Japan. This is the same department that has responsibility for whaling. The visit started well enough as the civil servant I was visiting, on noting that I was wearing a tie (and that he himself was not) made a colleague take off his tie so that there was an 'equality in our appearance'.
 
I should have realized early on that such an approach was an indicator of how Japanese Government negotiators view the world. Sometimes it’s not the logic of the situation that guides their positioning on the issue of whaling, but often some deeper reasoning that steers them and sometimes something that can be quite superficial.
 
I remember that after 2 hours of interviews the senior civil servant concerned was just building up to a crescendo of argument, claiming that whaling was ‘going to feed the third world’, was ‘going to be a source of a cure for many of the worlds major diseases’, - when I stopped him and asked him what his personal view of whaling was.
 
Pausing for a few seconds, and dropping the rhetorical stance of his previous pontification, the gentlemen said that, actually, he thought whaling was a distraction from the real issues that Japan faced in fisheries management.
 
When I pressed him why Japan would pursue such a policy that did not really serve its interests he pointed out that the system found it inherently impossible to change its set direction. I gathered from what he was saying that too many elements of the Japanese Government, civil servants and the fisheries industry, were locked into this self-destructive cycle of pride and annual whale killing, and no one element was placed to break out the cycle.
 
I asked him why he didn’t try and change things and his response was most probably the most damning indictment of the whole sorry tale.
 
He noted that his predecessor at the Ministry was now employed in one of the major fisheries companies (also involved in whaling) and that he owed not just his past allegiance to this individual, but that when he himself retired from the Ministry (I believe there was compulsory retirement at 55 in those days, but my memory may deceive me) he was relying on getting a job with his previous colleague.
 
It seemed that his continued support for whaling was his pension fund. A continuation of whaling meant that he and other civil servants would have a future job.
 
I now read that The Australian newspaper notes in a report on the Japanese whaling operation that a Japanese ‘parliamentary waste-cutting panel, convened by the new Hatoyama government, has recommended the [whaling] program's main source of loan funding, the Overseas Fisheries Co-operation Fund (OFCF), be effectively shut down’. The Australian also notes that ‘four of the OFCF's 12 directors are Fisheries Agency amakudari -- senior bureaucrats parachuted into companies and agencies that have relationships with their former ministries.’
 
As the Japanese whaling fleet sets sail it seems that in Japan dead whales still pave the way for ‘dead [retired] men's shoes’.

The New Scientist raises an interesting question in its 11th November edition. The article notes that 'Sounds thought to cause only temporary hearing loss have destroyed nerve cells in the ears of mice.' It would appear that '... noises that aren't loud enough to affect hearing thresholds can still cause permanent damage to ear cells.'                   

The article goes onto note that when mice were exposed to a 100-decibel noise source, roughly equivalent to a motorcycle engine, several tests indicated that this noise level caused no long-lasting changes in hearing threshold. 'Under the gaze of a microscope, however, damage was seen to the part of hair cells that transmits sound via chemical interactions with nearby nerves. A year later, the damage had seemingly spread to nerves that
transmit sound to the brain (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.2845-09.2009). 

But what is the importance of this  study for cetacean research? It would appear that a lot of research on ocean noise appears to concentrate on minimizing loud underwater noises to estimated thresholds. But what is really happening to whales and dolphins exposed to such noise? We may not be able to make such a leap from specially bred mice that have similar hearing characteristics as humans as used in this study to extrapolate to cetaceans, but lets also not dismiss our questions simply because we are talking of mice and men.

If long term damage is being caused to cetaceans are we yet to see long term conservation impacts? For such creatures that rely on sound to communicate, feed and generally 'exist' in a world of sound we may be storing up problems for the future.

WDCS has always called for a precautionary approach when it comes to noise pollution, yet we are often told mitigation methods employed by the extractive industries and the world's navies are 'appropriate'. Well it may be that there is not always an immediately evident impact, but this study may make us wonder what legacy we are leaving in our oceans.       

There is  a new feature film on Noise pollution just launching in Germany                                                                                                                                                                             

This is by our own Mark Simmonds. If you are thinking about how some government's are approaching the issue of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) for cetaceans this picture says it all. Maybe the UK should be thinking a little harder about what type and size of MPAs are really required -its going to get pretty crowded out there if some people have it all their own way.

Further to our comments on the pollution issue in whale products we note that Mattilsynet, the Norwegian Food Safety Authority has continued the advisory for pregnant and nursing women against eating whale meat “due to high levels of mercury that the meat can contain”.  The same is true for seal meat “from the Vestisen area”.  (see http://matportalen.no/Emner/Gravide )

 

The Health Directorate has also produced a brochure (http://www.helsedirektoratet.no/vp/multimedia/archive/00118/Gravid_118459a.pdf

Seems that the issue is hopefully getting through to the public - lets see what the reaction will be

I know it is cliché, but I honestly could not think of a better title for this post.

SkyTruth
obtained these new photographs, apparently taken from a nearby vessel
shortly after the fire was extinguished. The photos clearly show the
severe damage sustained by the Montara oil platform and the attached
West Atlas drill rig. These photos are from an anonymous source, so
their integrity can't vouch for, but they closely resemble this
post-fire photo taken by media in the same period and so seem to be
legitimate. WDCS join SkyTruth in thanking the photographer who took
these shots and is allowing us to make them available to the public.